James Axler – Cold Asylum

“Wildwooders,” Dean said, hefting his recovered Browning.

“Easy.” Ryan laid a hand on his son’s shoulder, gesturing to the scene behind him. “It’s over,” he called.

Krysty murmured in surprise. “Remember that curse.”

One or two of the hunting dogs, bolder than the rest, had sneaked, belly-down, to where the corpse of their master lay, his head almost severed by Doc’s Le Mat, and started to lick the blood from the body.

THE WILDWOODERS HAD FADED back into the shadows beneath the dripping trees as mysteriously as they’d appeared, without a word or a sign.

It was time to be moving on.

The glow from the fire lighted the sky behind the seven friends as they crossed the stone bridge over the south fork of the Antelope, heading back toward the distant redoubt.

Ryan had been right.

Disheartened by the reversal in their fortunes, all in the space of an hour, the inhabitants of the ville made no effort to pursue the destroyers of their lives.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It was evening when they got to the bluff at the edge of the plains that concealed the entrance to the redoubt.

“Anyone want to break for the night and rest up? Move on at dawn?”

Ryan’s suggestion was greeted by universal disapproval, Doc voicing it for everyone else.

“The past few days have been most exceedingly trying, have they not? Well, my dearly beloved brothers and sisters, let us bravely go toward the new world and get the jump completed. Then we can, perhaps, rest awhile.”

“Long as the bastard cannies don’t try for us again,” Dean said.

Michael spoke for the first time since executing Marie Mandeville. “We can handle them,” he said. “Fact is, we can handle just about anything.”

But none of them was ready for the unspeakably vile smell that oozed from the entrance to the redoubt. It seeped out at them before they’d even taken a step inside the military complex.

“Least we know what it is,” J.B. said, clamping a hand across his nose and mouth.

“Doesn’t make it any sweeter.” Ryan had knotted his white silk scarf around his face.

“Reckon most of the muties will have left.” Krysty looked around, staring out over the plain behind them when a gentle breeze whispered in the tops of the trees. She glimpsed the faint orange light that was the burning ville. “Difficult to feel anything about the place. But I can’t ‘see’ much life. Just the most death I ever felt, anywhere, anytime.”

THE SCENE INSIDE WAS barely describable.

Despite their ability to devour most kinds of carrion, it was obvious that the digestive system of the cannibal muties hadn’t been able to cope with the thousands of rad-poisoned, rotting corpses that had filled the redoubt.

Many of them lay dead, showing every sign of having died in hideous agony, knees drawn up to their chests, hands clutching their swollen abdomens, lips tugged back off yellowed teeth in a rictus of terrible pain.

A few were still alive, and their low cries echoed along the stinking passages and chambers of the vast fortress. But none of them tried to attack the seven invaders. Ryan picked a path around the dead and the dying, the SIG-Sauer cocked and ready in his hand.

“Think I’m going to be sick, Dad.”

Before anyone could say a thing, the boy was as good as his word. He bent over, hand against the lichen-smeared wall, puking copiously.

Doc instantly emulated Dean, bringing up the remnants of his last meal at Sun Crest, then wiping his mouth with the swallow’s-eye kerchief.

“By the Three Kennedys! I once walked though Hell’s Kitchen in the bowels of New York, during a summer heatwave. Many a poor soul went to pay their respects at the court of good King Cholera that year. But the miasma, vile though it was, could not hold a candle to this damned place.”

“Not far to the elevator, Doc,” Mildred said. “Once we get down into the basement level, close to the gateway, the smell shouldn’t be as foul.”

Ryan laughed. “One of the few times I’m really looking forward to making a jump.”

THE ELEVATOR STOOD SECURE, its doors closed.